New words

Once batch No.610 of bread was finished early this afternoon, off to vote in the church hall up the road. Then, for a change, off around the Horton Lane clockwise, something I have not done for a while. Started off with a couple of trotting sulkies just before the entrance to the lane, going at a smart pace but still holding up the traffic. Then down the lane itself, where the hawthorn was coming out and looking rather well, some days ahead of our own. It also seemed to be smelling quite strongly, something I don't often notice.

Through Ewell West, passing on bacon sandwich at the Luna Coffee Shop on this occasion, and up Longmead Road where, for a change, we had a couple of ducks grazing on the grass. I remember that when I used to walk this road most days, I occasionally came across water fowl in the stream, pollution from the industrial estate adjacent notwithstanding.

Returned to a convincing victory over BH at Scrabble, helped along by a bonus of 50 at some point for putting down all seven of my tiles to make 'mandrake'.

The word 'zo' (lower left quadrant) which we allow by custom, is indeed to be found in OED, in small bold, where it is listed as a regional variant of 'so', that is to say dialect. So according to the rules which we now play by, it should not be allowed. But custom trumps the letter of the law and the word probably figures in more than half our games.

I worried about 'borer', as a legitimate but obscure derivative of 'bore', as in bore a hole, but checking after the game, OED tells us that the word is used to name various wood boring bugs. So no problem there.

By the end, we just scraped a combined score of 550. So better than average, but not outstanding.

While the gentleman to the left of the score card is the Labour candidate for the Police Commissioner for Surrey. He got my vote, although I dare say one of the two ex-military, ex-police types on offer will take it - with one of them being the former Commissioner and the other being the current Commissioner. I didn't check what exactly was going on, but one did get to cast two votes for the commissioner, a first and second choice, so presumably one of the varieties of alternative voting, softening our traditional first past the post system - which worked well enough when we had just two major parties alternating in power in a reasonable way. Not so clear that that is where we are today.

PS 1: it didn't come up today but there is also a problem with the word 'taxi' which is not in the dictionary but which BH is keen to hang onto. Makes it that much easier to unload an 'X'. Or to be more precise, it is in, but is described there as a colloquial abbreviation of either taximeter or taxicab. With motor cabs fitted with taximeters just coming into use in London in the first decade of the 20th century - with the word being a confection involving a slightly unusual use of the word 'tax' and with this Volume IX, Part II (SU-TH) of OED being published in 1919. So not allowed.

PS 2: as it happens, I have just started to read a paper about the rate at which children learn words, much harder to measure than I had realised and involving some of the same dictionary flavoured problems as crop up in Scrabble. When does a word score for the purpose in hand? Anglin favours, for the purpose in his hand, the 1981 edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Not a dictionary I am familiar with.

Reference 1: Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis – Jeremy M. Anglin – 1993.